


Wake Up

by lesbianettes



Category: Chicago Med
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Death, Gen, Head Injury, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Sad, TBI, Trauma, hospital stay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:22:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22038496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: Noah's worst injury from the assault was a traumatic brain injury.
Relationships: Crockett Marcel/Noah Sexton, Noah Sexton & April Sexton
Kudos: 8





	Wake Up

When Noah comes to for the very first time, it’s been two full days since he was attacked. Or at least, that’s what they tell him. His memories are sloppy and thrown together, not quite painting a full picture of what happened to him besides the fact that it really hurt. Maybe it’s better that he doesn’t remember, because his body looks and feels like he was dropped into a blender and pulsed on high speed. Two to three minutes until creamy, he thinks dazedly. There’s no one else in his room, but a whiteboard across from him lists his medications and what scans they’re taking him through today, while his bedside table is crowded with flowers and balloons and get well cards. 

He fumbles around for a minute to find the call button, trying to make sure that they know he’s awake. Maybe they’ll have some answers for him, or at least be able to call up April. His memories are fuzzy, but he knows he needs to make sure she’s alright. He gets a nagging suspicion that there’s someone else he should be talking to, but it doesn’t make its way through the mess of his mind yet. Be patient, he tells himself. He’s going to be okay.

The nurse who comes to check on him is sweet, calling the doctor while she does some preliminary testing. Can he follow a pen light with his eyes? What’s his pain level like? Does he know his name? Is there anyone she can call for him.

“I want my sister,” he says. His mouth is clumsy. “April. She works in the ED.”

“I’ll call her for you.”

Noah tries to thank her, but his words stumble together, and he’s left frustrated with himself and confused as two doctors file in, one who introduces herself as Noah’s primary doctor, Dr. Warner, and another who he recognizes after a moment. Dr. Abrams. Something must have happened to his head, which explains a lot about how slow his mind is and how much he’s struggling to piece together.

Warner asks some of the same questions about the nurse, explains his injuries, and asks him how he’s feeling, to which he replies that he’s sore. And then Dr. Abrams clears his throat, not quite looking Noah in the eye as he speaks.

“You sustained a concussion and a fairly small subdural hematoma, a- a bruise on your brain in the temporal region. When you came in, the team thought it best to just keep an eye on it while they worried about more pressing injuries, but once you came out of surgery, you seized.”

Noah hears him, but the words aren’t processing well.

“We stabilized it, and you seem to be healing, but there could be some long term effects.”

“Like what?”

“It could cause problems with your memory, speech, concentration, mood- or none of them. It’s just a wait and see.” Dr. Abrams gives him a somewhat stiff smile and pats his shoulder gently. “I’m sorry, Noah.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Dr. Warner asks.

He struggles to fit together the pieces. It’s all out of order, hard to tell what came when. Opening presents for his birthday as a child and getting a residency at med and going to a busy party with tons of people at a naggingly familiar but unidentifiable location, all bright and vibrant memories, feel like they happened at the same time even though he knows that isn’t true. He just doesn’t know. But what feels the most recent is getting hurt.

“Pain,” he answers.

“Do you remember anything else about it?”

Noah shakes his head, even though it makes him a little dizzy. “No, sorry.”

“It’s okay. Some of it may come back with time,” she says, and before he can be bombarded with more questions, April’s coming in.

She looks rather haggard, compared to how put together she often is. Her hairline is loose with flyaways, bags heavy under her eyes, shifting unsteadily on her feet. Noah hates when she’s worried, because it usually means that he has to worry, and/or something bad is happening. This is how she was when he applied to medical school, after she put herself through nursing school to provide for him like their parents never have. She’s done a lot for him, he thinks, and he feels bad to have upset her like this.

“Hey Noah,” April says softly, pulling a chair up at his bedside. “How’re you feeling?”

“Never better.” 

She cracks a small smile. “I called Crockett when they said you were awake. He’s on his way, should be about twenty more minutes.”

Crockett, like the vague memory of a party, isn’t entirely strange but has no specific connotations in his head. He can’t put it together well, but he pretends to know what that means while she talks to the doctors and a good amount of it goes over his head. Concentrating on it makes his head start to hurt, which he chalks up to still being tired, so he lets them talk about it and struggles to put together the pieces. What names does he know other than April’s? He knows Dr. Abrams. He scours his brain and comes up with Maggie and Ethan, too, but much more than that starts to go fuzzy. He thinks of brown curly hair and a white coat, a name out of reach but a laugh burned into his brain.

“Noah.”

He blinks at April. The doctors aren’t here anymore, just them, and Noah wonders how he missed that.

“How are you? Really?” she asks.

“Everything hurts and my brain isn’t working.”

She laughs slightly, leans to press a button at his side that floods him with warmth and chases away the pain after a brief moment. A nice little dose of painkillers. He should have thought about that earlier, asked after it because there’s not a single part of him that doesn’t ache. When he looks at his hands, one has mottled bruises on it, and the other is wrapped up in a cast that stretches from the middle of his palm nearly all the way to his elbow. It’s bright, neon pink of all colors. He wonders who chose it. April wouldn’t have, but the curly haired girl in his memories would, he thinks. It’s hard to know. 

Noah relaxes back against the pillows, reveling in it for a moment before there’s a loud knock on the wall and he’s jerked back into reality to see a naggingly familiar face, smiling at him and holding a bouquet. Has it been twenty minutes since April got here? Because he’s pretty sure this is the Crockett she mentioned, setting down the roses at his bedside and pressing the gentlest of kisses to his temple.

“Hey sugar, it’s good to see you awake.”

More than anything in the world, Noah wishes something would happen to give him an excuse not to say anything, reveal that he doesn’t know who this man is or what they mean to each other. He looks at April pleadingly, hoping she’ll help, but she can’t. 

“Noah?”

He swallows and looks at the man. He looks pretty rough too, just like April, and he has the faint smell of liquor still on his clothes, like he had been drinking before he got here. He doesn’t sound drunk. But he smells it. 

“Noah, sugar, what’s wrong?”

“I- I-”

It’s April who puts a hand on the man’s shoulder and gives him a thin smile. “Maybe you should come back later.”

“But-”

“Crockett.”

Reluctantly, Crockett leaves the room, roses left behind and Noah’s skin burning with the memory of his kiss. She must have known something was wrong, and like when they were young, she’s protecting him. He can breathe easy now. Or at least easier. His chest hasn’t much been cooperating, but it’s perfectly fine with the combination of painkillers and a cannula giving him extra oxygen. His stats look fine, anyway, even if he doesn’t feel good.

“Noah, honey, do you know who that was?”

He wants to say yes. He wishes he could say yes. But he shakes his head slightly. “He seemed familiar…”

The last thing he wants is April’s pity, but it washes across her face anyway with a splash of worry and the slightest hint of anger. Not at him, he hopes. It’s hard to tell. But she’s very careful choosing her words when she picks up Crockett’s flowers and sets them out of Noah’s line of sight. 

“That was Crockett Marcel. He’s a trauma surgeon in the ED, you’re doing your residency under him.”

She stops there, but clearly there’s more to say.

“And?”

“You two have been together for a couple months.”

It would explain the flowers, how upset Crockett was, but mostly Noah is having a hard time believing that he had- has? A thing with a cocky surgeon who’s apparently in charge of him and from the smell of it, has a drinking problem. It doesn’t make sense. And why wouldn’t he be able to remember any of that?

“I don’t…”

Something must show on his face. Sadness, loss, confusion- something that makes April’s face go soft as she tucks his sheets around him like they’re children again, makes a soothing sound and fluffs one of his pillows. She’s mothering him. He doesn’t mind this time. It’s easier than trying to do it for himself right now. 

“Just get some rest, okay? We can figure it out later.”

And he is tired, so he nods slightly and relaxes into the bed. He hurts. There’s a part of him that wants to wake up later, with all the pieces put back together, and he won’t have to try and tape together shredded photographs of memories that he can’t imagine himself making. He prays, as he drifts off, for everything to make sense.

The next time he comes to, nearly a full day later, he has no more idea than he did last time. April is still there, but in sweatpants and a tee shirt as opposed to her scrubs, and there’s new flowers at his bedside. She smiles and tells him that hopefully, he’ll be able to go home in a week, except that Noah isn’t sure where home is. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.

“Good morning. Or good evening, I guess,” she says.

She sounds tired.

“Sleep well?”

“Ish,” he answers, and finds the painkiller button to help with the ache spreading through his body. On the whiteboard across from him, mixed up with words he can’t quite read, are pinned-up scans that are probably of his body. One of his chest shows a completely whited out lung. There’s one of his brain that’s got a bright blast of colors on it. “Are we supposed to have those?”

Immediately, April stands up and takes them down, tucking them out of sight. “I asked to see. Sorry.”

He looks down at his chest and wonders if that’s why it hurts. Probably. It could be blood or fluid, he has no way of knowing unless he asks, which he would rather not. This is one thing he’s happy to be ignorant of. The cards, however, he’s curious about, so he reaches clumsily over for the pile. With mild success, he gets them into his lap and can start trying to read them.

Key word, trying.

For whatever reason, he can’t make the lines turn to words. He spends maybe a minute or two staring at the one in front of him before he sets it down and wills himself not to cry. He won’t cry. This will be fixed soon, he’ll be fine.

“Do you want me to read them to you?”

He nods. This is humiliating, but it’s outweighed by his curiosity as April takes the first off the stack and reads it to him like a bedtime story. This one is from someone named Elodie, a name he doesn’t recognize but whose words seem like they were close. There’s a generic one signed by “the whole med staff,” one from Crockett, one from their parents. But then, April picks one up and immediately sets it back down.

“April?”

“It’s fine.”

She goes to throw the card away.

“April.”

“Noah.”

“Please?”

There’s a slow, deep breath. A sniffle. Hesitation as she opens the brightly colored card and shakily reads, “You’re lucky you’re still alive. Next time it’s your sister.”

Before he can ask what that means, she’s stepping out of the room with her phone and he has to guess this is about whatever put him in the hospital. He doesn’t know why, but clearly it’s bad, and if they hurt her, he’ll never forgive himself. He can’t let them hurt April. Whoever they are.

When he tries to remember, it just gives him a headache and brings him to painful tears and a sharper pain in his chest because of course he still can’t breathe. It’s only been a handful of days. He struggles for the call button, hoping that someone will help him, help April. In the moments between finally hitting the button and someone coming, there’s a taste like the way matches smell in his mouth. He doesn’t remember anything after that.

It’s only a few hours before he wakes up again. His body aches and tingles like he’s been shoved through an electric outlet and squeezed back out, and the room is crowded. April and Crockett. Dr. Warner and Dr. Abrams. A tall man with a dark jacket and a notepad. It’s a lot at once, and he forgets how to breathe for a minute while Dr. Abrams talks at him.

“I don’t…”

There’s a word that belongs at the end of the sentence, but he can’t find it. Instead, he trails off again. He’s been doing that lately. They’re all looking at him until the stranger pulls up a seat beside him and asks him what he remembers about the attack. 

“It hurt.” One of his hands raises to his head almost instinctively, finding bandages. Oh. “Something about- about-”

“It’s okay, take your time, sugar,” Crockett says.

What comes out of his mouth is “May.”

Everyone’s looking at him.

“April. I mean April.”

Dr. Abrams gives everyone a look and crosses his arms, but doesn’t interrupt the stranger. Probably a police officer, that would make sense.

“There was a woman.”

“Can you remember anything about her?”

Nothing comes to mind. A hint of a voice, but not enough for him to know what was said and there’s no face to fill the void. Useless. The stranger thanks him, leaves him, gives the seat to Dr. Abrams and the heavy black tablet in his hand.

“Noah, it doesn’t look like your brain is healing.”

He shows him a picture. The colors again, but it’s taking up more space and Noah has this nagging sense that he should understand it better than he does. So he nods slightly and looks around the room. They’re all still looking at him.

“We have a couple of options. We could do a craniotomy, where we would remove part of your skull to get to the blood clot, and drain it. There’s a good chance you survive it, about 80%. It’s too large for a burr hole. We could also just leave it alone and hope. Put you on anticonvulsants, keep you comfortable, and see if it heals on its own. It would be less invasive, and less painful, but there’s no guarantee.”

Noah nods.

“What do you want to do?”

If he’s honest, he doesn’t quite recall the options, and there’s nothing to suggest an answer on anyone’s face, so he finally gets out, “Whatever you think is best.”

“I’d recommend the surgery, and that we do it as soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

Except he doesn’t know for sure what he’s agreeing to, and he’s tired again from all the talking and the thinking and a nap sounds good, even though they’re still talking to him. More frantically now, louder, and he tries to stay awake as best as he can.

“Can you hear me?”

The face above him reminds him of his mother, and he smiles.

He wakes up in a different room with a nebulizer on his face. Nothing hurts anymore, but he can’t quite think of anything, either. His brain is blissfully empty, his mouth disgustingly dry, and the cold metal on his chest is making his muscles tighten. It’s harder to breathe now.

“Hey, you’re okay, Noah. You’re okay. Do you know where you are?”

Just barely, he manages to open his eyes, looking into a warm, soft brown face with a wide array of blonde curls. She’s wearing a white coat as she shines a light into his eyes. Too bright. Can’t see. But then it’s over and she’s backing away a bit, leaving him to try and orient himself in all this. There’s a couch, off to the side, where two people lay. Both familiar, but not recognizable. He should know who they are. He should know where he is.

The doctor is still waiting for an answer.

He doesn’t have one for her. 

The two people on the couch stir, get up in each other’s arms and come to his bedside, each reaching out to him with concern. The woman fluffs his pillows, the man holds his hand. They speak to him, but it doesn’t get through very well. He has no idea what they’re saying, but it feels rather safe and warm. He doesn’t have to worry about anything, not that he could if he wanted to, and rests against the soft bed while a gentle kiss lands on his cheek.

Noah does not wake up again.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @princessbekker


End file.
